My mother is American, Iowan, and fourth-generation German. This means her great-great-great-grandparents got brave one day, one year, one century, and they found their way out of Baden Baden or Schleswig Holstein and made it to Iowa in the mid-1800s. They farmed. They ate potatoes. They raised pigs, milked cows, and hitched the plow to giant workhorses. They worked up an appetite, drank beer, ate bacon and potatoes and pie crust made of lard. They spoke German until Hitler caused people with German last names all sorts of shame and embarrassment. My mom's father spoke German and English until he was in kindergarten. To this day he says he doesn't like Germans or Germany, accordions, The Amana Colonies, or anything German--unless it's edible. He likes bratwurst and sauerkraut, pies, potato salad, pickled herring, pickled anything, and other weird things that led to Germans being known as Krauts. The point I am making here is that any German in my mother's blood is wearing thin. An ocean, a century or two, Hitler, and several generations of DNA have come between Mom and the land of the cuckoo clock, the castle and the accordion. Please note I did not mention Germany as the Land of the Nibelungenlied. Mom is obsessed with "the German Illiad" too.
Mom was raised in the 1970s in a time when people had access to record players, radios and televisions. I mention this because technology brought us music with the flick of a switch, which liberated the world from live music. These days, we think of live music as a good thing, but there was a time when the only available music came from local musicians who only know how to play accordions fiddles or harmonicas. "Little Brown Jug" and "Turkey in the Straw" were the popular tunes of the day. However, by the time my mother could walk and talk, nobody played those songs anymore. Not even old people in nursing homes listened to or danced polkas, Schottisches and waltzes. Most of civilization had come to hate polka music--unless it was October and they all got really drunk first. Mom, through some peculiar back-flip of the DNA, likes German music. She likes it morning, noon or night. She likes it from the beginning of October through the end of September the next calendar year. To be fair, she likes Mozart and Mahler too, but her favorite music of all is The Underdog theme song because of the accordion nobody but Mom would ever hear in that song.
If anyone thinks it's bad enough to grow up in the 21st Century with a mother who left her heart in Munich before she was even born, imagine a mother who drags her children to hear accordion music played live. This happened in Swisher, Iowa, when a Mr. and Mrs. Livermore carried their children to polka dances. Their daughter Becky caught the polka bug and started taking accordion lessons at age ten. She has since recorded ten CDs as Barefoot Becky and the Ivanhoe Dutchmen. Every year she and her band play awful songs at the Amana Colonies Oktoberfest. The worst song of all has to be "O Du Schone Schnitzelbank," and if you think the photo is bad, try clicking on the you-tube link and listening to the song!
Every year, my mother lures us to the Amana Colonies with promises of parades, sugar cookies that never taste as good as they look, hamburgers that taste better than they look, and pretty pumpkin decorations. Somehow, she manages to keep us in the Amanas until she's gotten to hear that awful song. Grandpa tells me the words, as sung by Barefoot Becky, are the same words he learned, and they're stupid enough to kill brain cells on impact.
Ist das nicht ein Schnitzelbank? / Is not that a Schnitzelbank?
Ja das nicht ein Schnitzelbank. / Yes this is not a schnitzel bank.
Ist das nicht ein Haufen Mist? / Is not that a bunch of crap?
Ja das ist ein Haufen Mist. / Yes that's a bunch of crap.
Oh du schoene Schnitzelbank, / Oh you beautiful Schnitzelbank,
Oh du schoene Schnitzelbank. /Oh you beautiful Schnitzelbank.
There's no telling what damage this may have done to me on a cellular level. My children or grandchildren might enter this world with a passion for polka. My mom must have gotten it from her dad's mother, who always wished her only son would learn to play the accordion, but that was one wish he never granted her.
If my mother had to like German "music," and I use that term very carelessly here, she could have liked real music. And the scary thing is, she does. My voice teacher wants me to learn Schubert's "Du Bist die Ruh" ("you are my peace"), and Mom just had to hear every version of it on you-tube, and just had to get hooked on a version of it made famous by a long-dead German tenor. I'm supposed to memorize this song and perform it at a contest in November, but already I am so sick of hearing it, I wonder what my life would be like if Mom had a passion for jazz, or Brazilian samba. My brother does. Where did that come from? My dad plays classical music on the piano. He may have an Irish name, Kean, but his mom was all German and his dad was half German. Even so, my dad hates polka music as much as I do.
So what happened to my mom?
Mom's mother claims to have a little Native American on her side of the family. Supposedly, my mom's great-great-great-great grandmother, Ruby Masaqueto, was Algonquin. There is hope, then, of something better than German polka in our genes. Right?
Wrong.
Don't ever, ever ask me to blog about the CD my mom bought, full of Native American flutes, drum beats and grown men wailing. Hot, dry weather drove these people to such desperation, they sang and danced to a rain god asking for water to fall from the sky. Judging by the CD, it's no wonder the West is mostly desert. This so-called music had to have sent every last cloud to South America in search of better music.
Before the next Oktoberfest rolls around, I hope my mom will have discovered something in her ancestry that pulls her like a magnet to real music, no matter what nation, or galaxy, it comes from.
Ist das nicht ein Haufen Mist?
Ja das ist ein Haufen Mist.
By the way, I'm still not sure what exactly a Schnitzelbank is, and I am not eager to find out.
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